Thursday, 29 May 2014

I have been coding mainly in Python for a while now, using Sublime Text instead of an IDE. Recently, I have been looking at Java again, in order to develop Android applications. Now I understand all the benefits of Object Oriented Programming, generalization, abstraction, etc, but after coding pythonically for a while, Java programmers seem to overdo a little bit, sometimes. And by a little bit, I mean a lot, and by sometimes I mean nearly always. It feels like you can't do anything without implementing three abstract classes, extending two helper classes and creating a connector class, with a communicator class, and a helper class for each of these, and then some helper methods to help the helpers help other helpers. Just like big organizations, it becomes very difficult to find out where responsibility is actually being taken, instead of passed on to someone else, and the hierarchies become taller than your average Ent.

A good example is found in a newly created Android Project in Eclipse with the ADT plugin. The project space is seen below:

Hierarchies...

Here we can see a pretty impressive hierarchy. There's a directory called gen for Generated Java Files, it contains a single directory called android.support.v7.appcompat, which contains a single Java class file called BuildConfig.java, which contains a single class called BuildConfig, which contains a single variable (a boolean), which is set to true. Yes, that's a 5 layer hierarchy to store a single boolean constant.

Saturday, 24 May 2014

There are two types of people in this world, technology natives and technology immigrants. The first have grown up with technology, while the second have been introduced to it. While there are many ways to identify a native, the easiest way is to watch how he or she handles dialogue boxes. Immigrants will always read every word on a dialogue box, sometimes even hovering the mouse pointer underneath the word they are currently reading ("Would __ you __ like __ to __ save __changes __ to __ 'letter to Mr Jones written on 22 May 2014 revision 2 (2).2.docx'"), while natives subconsciously hit the desired option after only a glance at the text and buttons. "How did you know you had to press that button?" I sometimes get asked by an immigrant. I think about it, and work out I have no idea -- it's just a natural action like taking a step forward or chewing a mouthful of food. It's actually more difficult if I consciously think about it.

But then there are some really, really badly worded dialogues. And when I encounter these I feel like an immigrant. For example, once an FNB ATM has given you cash it will display "Select yes if you prefer a receipt for this transaction". What really rankles about this is that I can only imagine how many board meetings went into the design of this one dialogue. "Wait, we need to save paper, so let's try to discourage people from having a receipt. You need to opt-in to getting a receipt, rather than opt-out." "OK, but that's a bit confusing. It needs to be clear, as not everyone will speak English as a first language. Imagine if they got a receipt when they wanted not to. That would be a calamity". "I agree, let's get some more caviar in here. I've just polished this lot off."

Either "Would you like a receipt?" got rejected, or was never thought of in the first place. Every single time I see "Select yes if you would prefer a receipt for this transaction" I have to think about it. I stand in front of the ATM like an idiot, reading and rereading the simple message, while my brain switches over from subconscious to concious control, trying to figure out if I need to press Yes or No. A simple "Would you like a receipt?" or even just "Receipt?" would prevent this, and in an ideal world where that was the case, I would currently have an extra several minutes of my life to spend however I wanted. In fact I would have more time than that, because in addition to the several seconds for each use of an FNB ATM, I would also have the time taken to write this post.

Monday, 19 May 2014

Note - I have not actually yet managed to achieve what I set out to do, but below is a good starting point for using the Dropbox and Mega APIs through Python.

My Dropbox 50GB 2 year trial period expires in a couple of weeks' time. Mega however offers 50GB for free with no current time limit.

It makes sense then to migrate from Dropbox to Mega. Unfortunately the number of files I have on Dropbox means that it would be a pain to do this manually. Luckily both services provide APIs, and client libraries exist for Python. It would be nice if one could do this to move all Dropbox files to Mega, maintaining the directory hierarchy.

import megaimport dropboxm = mega.login(username, password)d = dropbox.login(username, password)for f in d.get_files(): m.upload(f)Unfortunately, one can't. It's a bit more complicated.The first step is to head over to the Dropbox website and get some API keys. Go here https://www.dropbox.com/developers/apps, click on Create App and select Dropbox API App.

Choose the following settings:

Files and Datastores (What type of data does you app need to store on Dropbox?)

No (Can your app be limited to its own folder?)

All file types (What type of files does your app need access to?)

You should be taken to a page which contains, among other things, an App key and an App secret. Take note of these.

Install the relevant Python packages:

pip install dropboxpip install mega
Create a file called dropboxtomega.py and open it in your favourite text editor, Sublime Text. (If this isn't your favourite text editor, give it a try; it soon will be).
The following code loops through all the files in your Dropbox account and saves them to the local folder, perfectly maintaining the directory structure. This isn't what we want to do (if we did, we'd just have used the official Dropbox sync app), but it's a good starting point.

Although the Mega API does provide the functionality to create folders and to save files to specific folders, this doesn't work too well with the library I'm using. Let's leave Dropbox for now and take a look at Mega:mega = Mega({'verbose':True}) #shows upload progressm = mega.login("yourname@youremail.com","yourmegapassword")m.upload("path/to/file.ext")Looks simple, right? No API keys or access tokens. It Just Works. To create a directory I should be able to do:m.create_folder("my_folder")

Which works. Then I should also be able to do this:

m.create_folder("my_sub_folder", dest="my_folder")Which doesn't. It seems to succeed but the folder does not appear. I should also be able to do this:m.upload("myfile.txt",dest="my_folder")Which throws a timeout error. Just when things looked like they would be easy.
Although we seem to be having difficulties moving the files and maintaining directory structure, we can still move the files, abandoning our hierarchy. This could be useful if, for example, the script had to run on a machine with less hard drive space available than the total amount of data stored in Dropbox. The recurse function used to upload is as follows. The biggest disadvantage of this is that it requires that None of your files in Dropbox have the same name, even if they are in different directories. It would be trivial to catch exceptions and append a -1, -2, etc to the end of such files, but that's hacky enough to make even me cringe. Note that even though the response from the Dropbox API seems to be a Python file object, it is in fact a custom REST Response object. The easiest way to ensure the data is a the format needed by the Mega API is to save the object to a temporary operating system file and to upload it that. This does add a lot of unnecessary disk IO, and there may well be a better way of converting the REST object to a Python file object.

The easy route out. Download the Dropbox sync app (which you probably have already if you've been using Dropbox). Download the Mega sync app. Once all your Dropbox files are synced to a local Dropbox folder, copy them to a local Mega folder, and allow the Mega app to sync back to the cloud.

Pros: fast, easy, likely to work
Cons: You don't get to mess around with Python and APIs

About Me

I'm far away from home in this country called "Europe". I'm studying towards a Master's in Computational Linguistics (I think - this might help: https://xkcd.com/114/). I write about web applications and Python and other things that you may find interesting (considering you got this far).